Cross posted on Passive Ranting.
An awesome piece in The New York Observer a couple of days ago seemed to have been missed. Writer Steve Kornacki takes on the ever-popular subject of Holy Joe Lieberman and gives him a verbal whipping.
Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s "This Week" that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War.
"Exasperating chunk of the electorate"? Be still my heart, someone in the media still values truth and principles.
The article is well worth a read, as it's overflowing with snarky gems such as:
When, as he did on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that "the surge is working," it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.
and:
"I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it ... the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year," Mr. Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry "Scoop" Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison.
Definitely read the whole article. It runs in stark contrast to other media outlets' views on Lieberman, which usually hover around "respect for a tough-on-terror Democrat."
It also points out that the forecast back in November after Holy Joe's squeak-by victory over Ned Lamont--you know, the one where Lieberman held all the power and could potentially blackmail either party with his support--is becoming so much bunk.
Republicans are beginning to see the writing on the wall and are slowly but surely inching away from Bush's Iraq disaster. Some have broken away clean, some are moving more slowly, but the trend is there. As public opinion of the war deteriorates--and public opinion of Republicans in general trends negatively--we can expect to see fewer and fewer Republicans standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder with President Dipshit and his faithful pet Lieberman.
As long as Bush and his administration continue to dig in their heels about Iraq and they continue to make bone-headed decisions like pardoning Libby, we can take comfort that there are fewer and fewer people who identify with Lieberman's perspective on Iraq:
In discussing the melting Congressional support for the war, Mr. Lieberman said on Sunday that "You might say that in Iraq we’ve got the enemy on the run, but for some reason in Washington a lot of politicians are on the run to order a retreat by our troops even as they are beginning to succeed."
The only thing that's beginning to succeed around here is rationality, as more and more of your peers distance themselves from you and your bestest buddy Bush and your willingness to allow our troops to die for nothing other than sheer hubris.
That is the legacy Joe Lieberman will leave behind. "Stubborn and cocky until the end."
And every Republican who continues to support Bush in his war may very well share that same legacy.